ALTRALANG Journal

Volume: 03 Issue: 01 / July 2021 pp. 138-145

e-ISSN: 2710-8619 p-ISSN: 2710-7922

Arabic Language and Computers. Application of

Computational Linguistics to serve the Arabic Language

Salim MEZHOUD1
1
University Center Abdelhafid Boussouf, Mila, Algeria
s.mezhoud@centre-univ-mila.dz

Received: 16/01/2021, Accepted: 30/06/2021, Published: 31/07/2021

ABSTRACT: The success of modern software for natural language processing

impresses. Programs for orthography and grammar correction, information
retrieval from document databases, and translation from one natural language
into another, among others, are sold worldwide in millions of copies nowadays.
The relationship of the Arabic language to the computer in the process by which
the learner acquires the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other
words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as
to produce and use words and sentences to automated communication.
KEYWORDS: Computational linguistics, Language, Machine translation,
Processing, Software.
RÉSUMÉ : Les ordinateurs sont devenus les outils les plus importants de
l'activité linguistique, car les études de linguistique informatique reposent sur
des programmes informatiques pour les systèmes de langage humain, en
normalisant et en simulant le système cérébral humain pour des systèmes de
travail pour ordinateurs. mécanisme. Cet article vise à clarifier la relation de la
langue aux ordinateurs, à découvrir l'influence de la linguistique
computationnelle sur le développement de la langue arabe et à généraliser son
travail automatisé dans divers domaines. Basé sur l'approche descriptive,
l'article explique comment tirer parti des capacités des programmes
informatiques dans l'analyse et le traitement de la langue arabe pour comprendre
diverses sciences et connaissances, et pour pratiquer l'enseignement et
l'apprentissage.
MOTS-CLÉS : Langage, Linguistique computationnelle, Logiciels, Traduction
automatique, Traitement

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Arabic language and computers. Application of Computational Linguistics to serve the Arabic Language.
Salim MEZHOUD
ALTRALANG Journal
Volume 03 Issue 01 / July 2021

‫ إذ تعتمد دراسات اللسانيات الحاسوبية على برامج جاسوبية‬،‫ أصبح الحاسوب أهم أدوات النشاط اللغوي‬:‫الملخص‬
‫ فهي‬،‫ من خلال تقييس ومحاكاة نظام عمل الدماغ البشري لنظم عمل الحواسيب الآلية‬،‫لأنظمة اللغات البشر ية‬
‫ معالجة‬،‫ يستغل التكنولوجيا المتطورة من أجل بلورة برامج وأنظمة لمعالجة اللغات الطبيعية‬،‫فرع تطبيقي حديث‬
‫يهدف هذا البحث انطلاقا من المنهج الوصفي إلى توضيح علاقة اللغة بالحاسوب وال كشف عن تأثير اللسانيات‬. ‫آلية‬
‫ و يوضح طر يقة الاستفادة من قدرات‬،‫ وتعميم العمل الآلي بها في مختلف المجالات‬،‫الحاسوبية في تطوير اللغة العربية‬
.‫ وممارسة التعليم والتعل ّم‬،‫برامج الحاسوب في تحليل اللغة العربية ومعالجتها لفهم العلوم والمعارف المتنوعة‬
.‫ معالجة‬،‫ لغة‬،‫ لسانيات حاسوبية‬،‫ ترجمة آلية‬،‫ برمجيات‬:‫الكلمات المفتاحية‬

Introduction:
The modern era world is characterized by the widespread use of natural
language processing technologies that are part of the global process of the
digitalization of society. As billions of users in this world send and retrieve
information, give voice and written commands, and use many symbols.
Although they do not realize the importance of their interaction, they are
actually contributing to the development of the use of algorithms and
software applications for processing natural languages texts.
Computational linguistics deals with the study of computer systems
that are dedicated to the analysis and generation of natural language units
(Grishman, 1986, p. 4)
In Arabic Linguistic Studies, the term "natural language processing"
(NLP), is used to define the concept of computational linguistics, but
special attention should be paid to the term “applied linguistics,” whose
accepted Arabic scientific meaning differs from its Anglo–American, or
generally Western interpretation. So Until recently, applied linguistics was
understood as a language teaching methodology, because these
developments in applied linguistics were dedicated to language study,
especially of English as a foreign or second language.
At Now, the field of applied linguistics has become more and more
broad, as it includes treatment of aphasia problems, speech disorders and
translation problems.
To the extent that language is a mirror of mind, a computational
understanding of language also provides insight into thinking and
intelligence. And since language is our most natural and most versatile
means of communication, linguistically competent computers would

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Arabic language and computers. Application of Computational Linguistics to serve the Arabic Language.
Salim MEZHOUD
ALTRALANG Journal
Volume 03 Issue 01 / July 2021

greatly facilitate our interaction with machines and software of all sorts,
and put at our fingertips, in ways that truly meet our needs, the vast textual
and other resources of the internet.
Definition of computational linguistics:
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the
computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of
appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general,
computational linguistics draws upon linguistics, computer science,
artificial intelligence, math, logic, philosophy, cognitive science cognitive
psychology, psycholinguistics, anthropology and neuroscience, and
others. Traditionally, computational linguistics emerged as an area of
artificial intelligence performed by computer scientists who had
specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural
language. With the formation of the Association for Computational
Linguistics, and the establishment of independent conference series, the
field consolidated during the 1970s and 1980s. The term "computational
linguistics" is now a days (2020) taken to be a near-synonym of natural
language processing (NLP) and (human) language technology. These
terms put a stronger emphasis on aspects of practical applications rather
than theoretical inquiry and since the 2000s. In practice, they have largely
replaced the term "computational linguistics" in the NLP/ACL
community, although they specifically refer to the sub-field of applied
computational linguistics.(Tim, 2020, p. 2)
If we say that computational linguistics was initially aimed at the
study of natural languages, then natural language must be defined.
In neuropsychology, linguistics, and the philosophy of language, a
natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved
naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning
or premeditation. Natural languages can take different forms, such as
speech or signing. They are distinguished from constructed and formal
languages such as those used to program computers or to study logic.
(Lyons, 1991, p. 68)
Computational Linguistics is a field of linguistics that deals with
making computers understand human language. Some of the biggest sub-
fields of computational linguistics are:
- Speech Recognition, which is a computer program that listens to people
talk and writes down what they said
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Arabic language and computers. Application of Computational Linguistics to serve the Arabic Language.
Salim MEZHOUD
ALTRALANG Journal
Volume 03 Issue 01 / July 2021

- Speech Synthesis, which is a computer program that takes writing and

reads it out loud
- Machine Translation, which is a computer program that turns one
language into a different one
- Dialog Systems, which is a computer program that talks back-and-forth
with a human to help them do something.
Beginnings and development of computational linguistics:
Computational Linguistics, or Natural Language Processing (NLP), is not
a new field. As early as 1946, attempts have been undertaken to use
computers to process natural language. These attempts concentrated
mainly on Machine Translation and, due to the political situation at the
time, almost exclusively on the translation from Russian into English.
Considerable resources were dedicated to this task, both in the U.S.A. and
in Great Britain, during the fifties and sixties. Other countries, mainly in
continental Europe, joined the enterprise, and the first systems
("SYSTRAN") became operational at the end of this period. However, the
limited performance of these systems made it clear that the underlying
theoretical difficulties of the task had been grossly underestimated, and in
the following years and decades much effort was spent on basic research
in formal linguistics. Today, a number of Machine Translation systems are
available commercially although there still is no system that produces fully
automatic high-quality translations (and probably there will not be for
some time). Human intervention in the form of pre- and/or post-editing is
still required in all cases. Another application that has become
commercially viable in the last years is the analysis and synthesis of
spoken language, i.e., speech understanding and speech generation.
Potential applications go from help for the handicapped (e.g., text-to-
speech systems for the blind) to telephony based information systems (e.g.,
inquiry systems for train or plane connections, telebanking) and further on
to office dictation systems (as offered by several vendors). Several text-to-
speech systems are commercially available, and are in daily use in many
places. The difficulties of speech understanding are much greater than
those for speech generation yet some of the speech understanding systems
are also entering the marketplace. An application that will become at least
as important as those already mentioned is the creation, administration,
and presentation of texts by computer. Even reliable access to written texts
is a major bottleneck in science and commerce. The amount of textual
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Arabic language and computers. Application of Computational Linguistics to serve the Arabic Language.
Salim MEZHOUD
ALTRALANG Journal
Volume 03 Issue 01 / July 2021

information is enormous (and growing incessantly), and the traditional,

word-based, information retrieval methods are getting increasingly
insufficient as either precision or recall is always low (i.e., you get either
a large number of irrelevant documents together with the relevant ones, or
else you fail to get a large number of the relevant ones in the collection).
Linguistically based retrieval methods, taking into account the meaning of
sentences as encoded in the syntactic structure of natural language,
promise to be a way out of this quandary. However, the creation of texts is
also becoming a problem. Manuals of complex technical systems
(airplanes, computers etc.) are constantly out of date as the systems
themselves are upgraded ever faster. Writing manuals by hand is thus
getting ever more expensive and unreliable, and if manuals have to be
maintained in different languages, manual production becomes
increasingly unmanageable. If different versions of the manuals have to be
written (for service users, for technicians, for auditors etc.), things get out
of hand altogether. The automatic creation of manuals from a common
knowledge base, in different languages and for different types of readers
is a possible solution of this cluster of problems. The creation of natural
language texts has always been a bit of "poor cousin" in the field of
Computational Linguistics. The situation described is about to change this
in a fundamental manner. Another topic that might come to the forefront
of research in Computational Linguistics is the presentation of textual
information. Traditionally, text generation systems have created standard,
i.e., linear, text. If the amount of text is large, and/or if different types of
readers must be addressed, hypertext is a better medium of presentation.
The automatic creation of hypertext from an underlying knowledge base
calls for an extension of this traditional approach (Martin, 2015, pp. 1-2).
Machine Translation:
Machine translation is a sub-field of computational linguistics that
investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one natural
language to another.
In the 1950s, machine translation became a reality in research,
although references to the subject can be found as early as the 17th century.
The Georgetown experiment, which involved successful fully automatic
translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English in 1954, was
one of the earliest recorded projects (Gordin, 2015, p. 8). Researchers of
the Georgetown experiment asserted their belief that machine translation
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Arabic language and computers. Application of Computational Linguistics to serve the Arabic Language.
Salim MEZHOUD
ALTRALANG Journal
Volume 03 Issue 01 / July 2021

would be a solved problem within three to five years. In the Soviet Union,
similar experiments were performed shortly after (Madsen, 2009, p. 11) .
Consequently, the success of the experiment ushered in an era of
significant funding for machine translation research in the United States.
The achieved progress was much slower than expected; in 1966, the
ALPAC report found that ten years of research had not fulfilled the
expectations of the Georgetown experiment and resulted in dramatically
reduced funding. Interest grew in statistical models for machine
translation, which became more common and also less expensive in the
1980s as available computational power increased. Although there exists
no autonomous system of "fully automatic high quality translation of
unrestricted text", there are many programs now available that are capable
of providing useful output within strict constraints. Several of these
programs are available online; Google Translate and SYSTRAN system
that powers Alta Vista's BabelFish (Bar-Hillel, 1964, p. 174).
Some researchers and philosophers believed that digital computers
would achieve linguistic universality by overcoming the differences
between languages and within the same language per se. For example,
mathematician Warren Weaver in1949, explained his vision and hope for
linguistic universalism in a note that became a catalyst for research
Machine translation in United States of America (Hutchins, 2000, p. 17)
Warren Weaver expected that computers would solve the problem
of the infinite diversity of languages by defining a global infrastructure
upon which all human languages are built, and he predicted that computing
machines would be able to translate between all languages, to build a
bridge between the different forms of human communication. Common
Human Communication, established by Weaver by a universal set of rules
by which all languages must operate (Weaver, 1955, p. 23),
Anyone who has experienced modern translation applications over
the Internet will know that Weaver's dream is on its way to fulfilment, as
computer programs now can recognize human speech, but the goal of a
single language that brings together all human languages into a single
global infrastructure, remains elusive for the time being. While the
promise of machine translation had long helped research into speech
recognition technologies, by the 1970s speech science had begun to
abandon the search for a universal, undiscovered Weaver language.

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Arabic language and computers. Application of Computational Linguistics to serve the Arabic Language.
Salim MEZHOUD
ALTRALANG Journal
Volume 03 Issue 01 / July 2021

Despite the amazing human ambition to talk to the machine, we still

use speech recognition techniques in specific applications in electronic
shopping, the automated voice assistant that leads us to issue a statement,
or the mobile phone applications that direct us through a series of specific
actions to the target What is meant, however, is that we do not always need
to speak to a machine. In many social and psychological situations, we
need to speak to people like us.
Conclusion:
Computational linguistics is an important science that helps in the civilized
response to the rapid technological development in various fields, and thus
it can be employed in the service of the Arabic language and its sciences.
I suggest the following:
- All basic types of Arabic words (noun, verb, and letter) must be electronic
coding, as well as subclasses such as pronouns, nouns, sign nouns, etc.,
according to the phonemic and lexical system of the Arabic language.
- Solutions should be found to the capitalization problem, so that we can
distinguish between nouns and adjectives in machine translation, towards
the word (happy) or (Saeed).
A large amount of fully vocalized Arabic text that can be processed should
be stored in a language-text bank in the computer's memory.
The history of Arabic literature from the pre-Islamic era to the current era
should be digitized, as should the digitization of linguistic sciences.

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Arabic language and computers. Application of Computational Linguistics to serve the Arabic Language.
Salim MEZHOUD
ALTRALANG Journal
Volume 03 Issue 01 / July 2021

References:

 Bar-Hillel. (1964). Language and information. Massachusetts: Addison-

Wesley.
 Gordin, M. D. (2015). Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and
After Global English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 Grishman, R. (1986). Computational Linguistics: An Introduction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University.
 Hutchins, J. (2000). Warren Weaver and the Launching of MT, Early Years
in Machine Translation . Amsterdam: Brief Biographical Note.
 Lyons, J. (1991). Natural Language and Universal Grammar. New York:
Cambridge University Press. pp. 68–70. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
 Madsen, M. W. (2009). The Limits of Machine Translation (Thesis).
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 Martin, V. (2015, November 22). adweb aclwiki. Consulté le December
2020, 31, sur Frequently_asked_questions_about_Computational_Linguistics:
https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/Frequently_asked_questions_about_Computational
_Linguistics
 Tim, B. (2020, August 17). ACL Member Portal. Consulté le December 20,
2020, sur he Association for Computational Linguistics Member Portal:
http://www.aclweb.org
 Weaver, W. (1955). Machine Translation of Languages, Fourteen Essays .
Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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